The United States will export a record $191 billion worth of agricultural products this fiscal year as the world scrambles to replace the corn, wheat, and vegetable oil it would normally get from Russia and Ukraine, said the Agriculture Department on Thursday. It would be the second year in a row of record-high farm exports.

Yaroslav Trofimov reported on the front page of Monday’s Wall Street Journal that, “Russian and Ukrainian officials prepared to meet for the first talks since Moscow began its invasion four days ago, as Ukraine’s defenders held on to the capital, Kyiv, and pushed back Russian troops in urban combat in its second-largest city, Kharkiv.

“In a sign of growing tensions with the West over Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the country’s nuclear-deterrence forces to be put on alert.

Clogged U.S. ports are being given access to nearly $450 million in federal money from President Joe Biden's infrastructure law as part of the administration's recent stepped-up efforts aiming to ease supply chain congestion and lower prices for American consumers.

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg on Wednesday announced the availability of a first batch of competitive grants for ports that will be double last year's amount annually for five years. The grants are aimed specifically at reducing bottlenecks that have slowed the flow of goods to store shelves and pushed up costs.

Logs dominate Indian imports, but the share of log imports has come down from 83 percent in 2007 to 48 percent in 2018. A favorable tariff structure has supported log imports, but the poor/inadequate level of processing by domestic sawmills has prompted the Indian trade to import higher volumes of lumber versus logs in recent years.

Last week, USA Rice joined more than 100 agriculture organizations in a letter to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) urging action on ocean shipping reform legislation for agriculture.

Between wildfires, drought, a trade war and the COVID-19 pandemic, the last few years have been hard on California farmers. But recent research by agricultural economists suggests that economic losses to California agriculture from recent supply chain disruptions may have an even greater economic impact.

In the wake of retaliatory tariffs targeted at U.S. agricultural goods, USDA paid out a total of $23 billion to farmers under the 2019 and 2019 Market Facilitation Program. In further evaluating the program, a Government Accountability Office report reveals that USDA picked winners and losers in how it allocated trade damage payments to farmers.

GAO estimated that, for example, total 2019 MFP payments to corn producers were approximately $3 billion more than USDA’s estimate of trade damage to corn, while payments to soybeans, sorghum and cotton producers were lower than their estimated trade damages.